Homelessness is the symptom, not the disease

After six years of homelessness, Shayla Gorman, left, lifted her and her son out of poverty and got an education and a job as youth out-reach worker. Now she's trying to help her sister, Courtney MacDonald, do the same. (AARON BESWICK / Staff)

Editor's Note: Thousands of Nova Scotians face daily challenges keeping a roof over their heads and food on the table, let alone living a safe and rewarding life.

Today 500 volunteers fan out across the city for a day of action, part of a campaign by United Way, supported by Halifax Regional Municipality, to develop and implement a comprehensive anti-poverty strategy. In the coming months, we'll be watching how they do and bringing you stories of people, their struggles and solutions, large and small.

Mason wouldn’t have known that day five years ago that he was saving his mother.

How could he have? He was an infant and social workers were taking him away from her.

“I was a terrible mother and it opened my eyes,” said Shayla Gorman. “From that day I changed my life completely.”

Gorman wasn’t much more than a child herself at that time.

She was 18 and had spent the previous six years of her life on park benches and in bank doorways and drug houses from Halifax to Truro to Sydney.

For Gorman, her first step to get Mason back was to find a safe, clean home to welcome her son into.

She wasn’t alone.

The search for proper shelter has driven much of human history.

That’s still the case in Nova Scotia in 2017.

There are no numbers on how many people are homeless in Nova Scotia. But the community organizations spoken to by The Chronicle Herald all echoed the same observation — the services available fall well short of the need.

The acuteness of the need is particularly high outside of the Halifax Regional Municipality, home to nearly half of Nova Scotia’s population, where it is taxing to provide affordable housing and emergency shelters for huge areas.

“It’s not just about affordable housing, it’s also about adequate housing,” said Lucille Harper, executive director of the Antigonish Women’s Resource Centre.

“Adequate housing provides a stable base for people to move forward with their lives. Once they have that base, they can look at the longer term and say, ‘All right, I have to stay home for the next four years until my youngest is in school, is there training I can do? Are there other things I can do, too?’”

Homelessness a symptom of Nova Scotia's housing issues

Homelessness is an acute symptom of Nova Scotia’s housing woes, but it is not the disease itself.

A myriad of factors contribute to the condition, including substance abuse, family violence, high rent, an absence of public transportation, a scattering of services provided by community organizations, and a shortage of government-funded infrastructure.

Outside of the HRM, all these factors are exacerbated by economic decline — a struggle to find decent work that will pay for a good home.

To much fanfare, Nova Scotia unveiled its first provincial affordable housing strategy in 2013.

The centrepiece of that strategy was and is Housing Nova Scotia — a new body to replace the former Nova Scotia Development Housing Corporation — armed with $500 million the province planned to invest in housing initiatives over the next decade.

Housing Nova Scotia had a progressive mandate taken from broad public consultations and best practices from other jurisdictions.

And it has had successes.

There are 3,700 people on the public housing waiting list — down 20 per cent from 2014.

The government has committed to shrinking that list by 10 per cent a year for the next three years.

Housing Nova Scotia has made deals with private and non-profit landlords to open up 675 units to people who will have their rent subsidized by the provincial government.

“The need is vast and there’s been a 25-year hiatus where there wasn’t much getting done,” said Colleen Cameron, chairwoman of the Antigonish Affordable Housing Society.

“So I think we’re building momentum now but we are just getting started. It’s becoming a more mainstream topic because a lot of people here don’t know that there is a need for affordable housing.”

In April, the Antigonish Affordable Housing Society opened up a four-unit building with rents well below market value — ranging from $550 a month for a single bedroom unit to $650 a month for two bedrooms. But they had 50 people apply.

“We didn’t even interview a good many of the applicants because they didn’t have the income to afford the rents we can offer,” said Cameron.

Construction will start next spring on a 10-unit expansion that will open by September. A third of the $1.5-million expansion will be funded by Housing Nova Scotia, while the rest will paid for through financing and donations.

“I’d call it a good drop in a really big bucket,” said Cameron of the expansion.

Finding a home with Roots for Youth

When Gorman went looking to turn her life around, she wouldn’t have been able to afford an apartment at the Antigonish expansion. Living in Truro and having known conflict for most of her life, she turned those lessons into persistence — calling the public housing agency weekly for a year and a half.

“Then one day they said, ‘Actually, we do have a place for you,’” remembered Gorman.

She paid a third of her income — $295 a month — for the apartment.

Now she was armed with a clean, safe place from which to wage the battle ahead.

She cleaned up her act, got her son back, got access to child care so she could attend adult high school during the days. All the while she’d been thinking about how to provide for her son.

“I didn’t want other youth to follow the same path I did,” said Gorman.

So she enrolled in the Nova Scotia Community College’s two-year child and youth care program. That landed her a work placement at Pictou County Roots for Youth, and that turned into a full-time job.

“I fell in love with this place. I felt like I was home,” said Gorman.

Since 2011, Pictou County Roots for Youth has operated a four-bed emergency shelter for homeless people 16-24 years old. Created by local concerned citizens, it was attempting to fill a need created by a gap in the law. Youth aged 16-18 were too old for foster care but too young to receive income assistance.

That law was changed on March 1 with an amendment to the Child and Family Services Act that makes the department responsible for youth who volunteer to accept their services.

“We all celebrated a little bit when that law was changed,” said Stacey Dlamini, executive director of Roots for Youth.

“But in practice what we’ve seen is that the law may now be on the side of these youth (but) the resources aren’t in place to support it.”

So when Dlamini recently went looking for space in a provincially funded group home, she was told there were no beds available and those that became available would be given first to youth who had been in foster care.

So the need for Roots for Youth has remained, and expanded. In September, they opened two three-bedroom transition houses. One is for young women and the other for young men, and both are about to be at capacity.

Roots for Youth’s budget for its entire operation is $150,000 a year, which it has raised through donations and funding provided by the Aberdeen Health Foundation and the United Way.

However, they have been told by the Department of Community Services that they are in line to receive provincial funding in the next budget year.

While Pictou County has Roots for Youth, Antigonish County and Guysborough County don’t.

The population outside of the HRM have all the varied needs of their urban counterparts, but those needs are harder to attend to when widely dispersed.

“We can’t expect every rural community in this province to have a complete end-to-end solution for every social problem,” said Dlamini.

“But I do think we could develop a greater consistency of services through regional hubs. Someone from Larry’s River would probably feel more comfortable in New Glasgow than they would in Halifax.”

For her part, Gorman is now a foot soldier in the struggle to find homes for people who need them.

One of her first charges has been her sister, Courtney MacDonald.

The 20-year-old’s life had been on a similar trajectory to Gorman’s: a life in and out of foster care, then at 16 a series of toxic relationships with men.

“You’re looking for love, looking for that security,” said MacDonald.

Between apartments with boyfriends, she would crash on couches of friends and family.

“Every night I would be asking my friends or sisters if I could sleep on their sofa or even make a bed on the floor if need be,” she said.

“The thought of being a burden on others, my family and friends, made me worry about how they would look at me. I’d worry if I ate too much of their food, worry if I was annoying them, or taking up too much space or their time.”

Then a week ago, Gorman told MacDonald she could have a bed at Roots House in New Glasgow.

So now Gorman is working with her, as she does with other youth, on life skills and being emotionally self-aware.

And MacDonald, with a safe place to sleep each night where she doesn’t feel like a burden on anyone, is starting to look ahead.

“Being a troubled youth is harder than society makes it seem,” she said. It’s hard to form healthy friendships and relationships with the constant feeling of being a burden. It’s hard to think of a positive future when nothing in the present is going right or at least OK. It’s hard to not give in to temptations that temporarily take away your fears or struggles, depression or anxiety. It’s also hard to accept help, when everyone else who’s tried to help you made you feel like a lost cause.

“Luckily for me, having seen my sister Shayla struggle herself and go to the very last steps of hell before she made the choice to pivot — that’s the inspiration for me . . . that gives me hope for me and my future.”